Wheel Tappers and Shunters

Cylindrical "Sausage" turf

Way, way back when I was a student (70's?) there was a rather silly variety show on TV known as the "Wheel Tappers' and Shunters' Social Club" about which I can remember very little, but the name, which I found intriguing. It derives from the fact that in railway engineering there was a task to check whether the steel wheels of rolling stock (carriages, railway trucks etc) might be cracked and this was done by whacking each wheel with a hammer and listening to the ring, or otherwise. Sound wheels rang, cracked ones answered the whack with a dull 'clonk'.

Achillea millefolium (a Yarrow cultivar)

I only mention this because we had 'The Man from ESB' (Our electrical supply company) all around the property and surrounding fields this week testing the "telegraph poles" for soundness in exactly the same way. Walk round whacking them high and low with a hammer and listen (I presume knowledge-ably and skillfully) to the noise. If a pole proved to be suspect, then phase 2 of the process involved hammering a 6 inch nail into the wood and seeing how easily it sunk in. We got chatting to him and he proved to be a fascinating bloke, brilliantly chatty and a mine of local lore to listen to.

One of two hugely spreading "Orion" geraniums

We have a pole on this property which has been concerning us because it is (now) well buried in the earth bank and surrounded by elder trunks and branches as well as having our previously mentioned buried clamp of 'sausage' turfs at the base. We wondered whether the burying of the first 5 feet or so of the pole would have given it damp-rot and also then whether our works to unearth all the turf and re-model the bank might undermine the pole (cutting off power to the rest of the lane!).

New Keet Run

Well, the pole is one of a batch now about 52 years old, most of which are still sound (others in the area, only 11 years old are rotting badly already) but our particular one is indeed rotten and is now marked for replacement in the next 2 months. The sausage turf is not, as I had guessed, ancient, hand-won stuff. It is cut and extruded by a machine like the modern (rectangular) stuff, but a different machine which favours the wetter bogs and is still in use in much of Mayo. So it could well be from our previous owner, TK-Min's days on the farm, maybe only 20 years old or there-abouts.

Keet run from the south end.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we have met our ever-growing Keets' need for more space by slotting a clever little run into a bit of waste-ground between our 'Primrose Path' and the Eastfield. This is basically a 6 foot tall, 9 feet wide and 30 feet long rectangle with a coop and gate at one end. It was cheap as chips. The 'walls' are made from a donated roll of 6 foot high 2" chicken wire, held up on the big trees or existing fence posts, and the roof is a piece of fruit-cage bird-netting held up by polypropylene 'rope' and the gate wrangled out of rough-cut 2 by 1 and a half inch timber.

Keets at 5 weeks explore the new big space.

We successfully moved the ten half-grown guinea fowl keets (babies) which are now well able to fly and to run much faster than Liz or I can (!) using a cat-basket method suggested to us by Charlotte (Thanks, Ch!) who was reported to have been in fits of laughter telling her Mum how we had originally proposed doing it, but I will draw a veil over that bit. There was one small hiatus when we went back to check on them and saw, sitting cutely in a row on top of the coop (inside the run), a row of nine keets. Nine? Didn't we have ten? Number ten was sitting up on the polyprop rope on the top of the run - he/she had found a tiny corner where we had left a gap twixt wall and roof and got out somehow. That one was quickly rounded up and gap closed with a bigger, more powerful cable-tie (Thanks again, Ch!) and we have had no escapes since.

We were not actually looking to sell these keets (yet, anyway) so we had not advertised them anywhere, but John Deere Bob had let a friend know we had them, when talking to the guy and finding out that like us, he had lost his male bird. We had no sooner released them into the new run and I had snatched these pics of the ten, than this guy (Declan G) arrived wanting to buy 3 (un-sexed) birds hoping there would be a replacement cock-bird among them. We sold them for €8 each which will nicely pay for most of their chick crumb and growers' pellets. I have since had a 2nd call from a lad who wants 2 more, so the word may be spreading but we will not sell any more after that - we want to know what these guys taste like after all this hard work!

It's not ALL glamarous cooking - a first go at
home made pizza.

We also managed to sell, at last, a couple of baby rabbits. We seem to be plagued on the local 'classified ads' website, Donedeal.ie with getting very few bites and a huge percent of those who make contact prove to be time-wasters who do not phone back when they say they will, or don't show up. You also get short text conversations which end without apology or 'goodbye' when they say something like 'where are you?' and you say County Roscommon.

Possibly the best Black Currant Clafoutis ever.....

It seems to be perfectly OK here to just stop texting. There is no need, apparently to finish with 'Ohh, that's a bit far, I'll pass' or 'OK, sorry to trouble you'. I am not alone in this - plenty of sellers complain of the same problem. One trap I have not fallen into yet and do not intend to is to hang around the house waiting on a call or a visit. If I'm in, I'm in. However, you do occasionally get the exact opposite, a serious, well meaning, polite buyer willing to drive all the way from Galway; in this case they got a bit lost en route and took 3 hours but still turned up. They were a Lithuanian couple, again brilliant people who we felt would have stayed and chatted for hours. They took 2 female bunnies at €20 each. They had actually wanted a breed-able pair but ours are all brothers, sisters and litter mates. They will keep hunting for a Giant breed buck.

Hubbard rooster at 10 weeks, carcass weight 2.012 kg.

Rather early, on Day 72, we decided to start 'harvesting' our Hubbard chickens, delivered as 1 day old chicks on May 1st. Although they are a bit young yet, the roosters in particular are already starting to look huge and are starting to clutter up the place - we get that feeling of too many chickens under foot when we walk in the yard. So, pretty much as an experiment, this guy got the chop and turned out to have a live weight of 3.016 kg, a carcass weight of 2.012 kg (plus 232 g of 'bits' (liver, heart, gizzard for us and the neck for the cats!) Not bad for a free range bird only just over 10 weeks old!

Pioneer gardening. Liz hefts a rock.

So that's about it for recent adventures. Opening up the run for the keets showed us that we have yet another untamed bit of 'garden' which needs sorting, so Liz has been out pioneering in the stinging nettle proof gloves and rock-proof wellies, breaking off only to study the gardening books for the 'dry shade under trees' species. Convallaria, anyone?

Waiting for the Eleven

Change of day-length vs days through year (50N).

We are doing really well for eggs at present, what with it being, I suppose, peak season, Equinox an' all that. We have 11 hens and have had two days in the last week where they have laid, between them, 10 eggs, though the norm is around 7 eggs. We are also getting one every other day from each goose and, we think, a daily Guinea fowl egg since the 18th. Today we thought we might be on for the 'full chicken house', 11 from 11 - we had already collected ten and there was a cackling, clucking racket going on mid afternoon as if someone was proclaiming another arrival, but no, it was a false alarm and the girls are keeping us waiting.

Min (left) and Henry (right)

I love all the physics around Equinoxes and day-length, At the Equinox, most people know, we have equal daylight and night-time hours (well, almost, there is some detail around this to do with latitude and the not-exactly perfect elliptical orbits) but this is also the time of the fastest CHANGE of day length. We are effectively accelerating towards summer at the fastest rate, with days getting longer at around 3 minutes per day, 21 minutes a week (spread across both ends of the day, of course), which is why you can easily see and feel it. This currently affects us more intensely than when we lived in the UK, because chicken 'bed-time' moves with darkness hours, and is currently around 7 pm, earlier on gloomy, cloudy evenings, later on bright sunny ones. Our 'bee school' starts at 8 pm, an hour away in Longford town, so for yesterday's we'd been worried since the previous class that we might have to be late for this one as we chased the last few chooks to bed before we could set out on the journey. It was close, but luckily Monday evening was cloudy, rainy and I could lock everyone up by 6:45 pm. For the next two sessions, it will not matter because the clocks will have changed.

Enjoying the spring sunshine

We also do very well for meals created from left overs; we throw very little food away which, in turn, means we do not have to worry about cooking too much. I have been enjoying a superb parsnip soup born out of big dig of the roots. Tonight was cold roast lamb (leg of Dora) with that lovely, soul-food, winter-warmer "Champ", mashed potatoes cooked back up with left over leeks and sprouts with some runner beans added and, beautifully, including the golden "burnt crispy bits" (BCBs; a food group in their own right!)

The entrance to the turf 'mine'.

Talking of left overs and springtime, the lovely weather has me out in the garden re-starting some jobs abandoned last autumn as it got too wet and cold, one of which is the earth bank which houses the half buried horse-drawn hay-rake. At the hay rake end we were uncovering some old hand 'won' "sausage" turfs and wondered whether we have in fact a 'clamp' left over from the TK-Min or even the TK-Max days. Well, I am now working in from the other end, a good 15 feet away and have come across what may be the other end of the clamp. We suspect that this is not any kind of official clamp, more a pile of turfs which got buried under some bulldozed topsoil, but they are lovely. They are up to around 5 inches diameter and cylindrical, the longest bits up to a foot long. They are buried like the ice-cream in a baked Alaska and it is a simple matter to lift them out from the entrance to the 'mine' as I work my way along the bank - I am getting barrow loads. Free fuel for next winter if I can get them dry.

Finally on the spring theme, we hear from our sheep man, Kenny O'C that he has just started lambing with a first batch of 5 lambs born on a lovely sunny day. We have put our order in for 5 again as last year, including one for the Sparks's and one for the Silverwood tribe. We'll probably get them, all being well, around July time. Their field is currently resting after its horse residence through the winter, and is already starting to look visibly greener. It is also pleasingly free from the rushes which badly infested it when we moved in. That is down to the mowing, strimming and sheep and horse grazing and gives us a little glow of pride at having improved the pasture we took over.

Chicken Commotion

Tuesday 26^th June is an easier day for us with none of the dramas of the weekend. It's a "soft" morning (i.e. drizzling) so much of it is indoors. The half doors for the utility room get more coats of paint, with Mum applying bright post office red. Dad makes some wholemeal bread using recipe from some friends on the internet (50/50 wholemeal and strong white flour, shorter first rise time, longer proving time and he is delighted when it turns out to be light, elastic and softer than the dense brick he has been creating up to now. Dad digs some more soil out of the piles surrounding the hay-rake-in-a-hedge and discovers (inevitably) more buried plastic bale-wrap sheeting but also (pleasingly) another stash of "sausage" turf. These are olde style, hand-dug peat 'sods' but cut (or reconstituted/extruded?) like thick sausages, 3-4 inches in diameter. These have probably been buried in this shallow grave for 30+ years but hey, peat is peat; it's not going to spoil for a few more years underground, so we bring some in tonight and chuck it on the fire and of course, it dries out and burns. Proper peat-smoke! Very Irish!

An early bit of drama is provided by Ginny the rabbit on Weds 27^th. Dad and I have come downstairs at the usual 06:30 and done the rounds of the livestock, releasing chooks from their shed and rabbits from their hutch. We are back indoors sitting down when we hear a commotion from the chooks. Dad nips round to check and finds Ginny up on her hind legs just outside the chicken run introducing herself to the Lovely Girls and they, having never seen a rabbit before are quite alarmed! Dad is in dressing gown and slippers. There is no way he’s going to catch Ginny (even if he was in running spikes) but Ginny is reasonably steerable by gentle persuasion. If you get behind her you can mush her in the rough direction you need but she’s picked up her skirts and is loving the freedom to run around the acre-age! At one stage she’s up through the allotment pausing to sample cabbage and sprout leaves. She is eventually rounded up. Dad discovers that where I’ve been pulling and and biting on the 2 inch mesh chicken wire, I have made bunny sized holes. He resolves to add a 2^nd layer of one inch mesh as belt and braces. He is kind of glad we do live in a quiet area, not overlooked.

 

We have no TV but Mum and Dad are enjoying evening's entertainments through t'internet with combinations of silly R4 stuff like "The Now Show" and "Sorry I Haven't a Clue", stories like the currently running "Chamomile Lawn" and recently finished "Night Watch" (Terry Pratchett), plus a BBC-shop DVD of the Griff Rhys-Jones series "Britain's Lost Routes". The latter was bought mainly for the Thames Barge episode, but proves to be good throughout. Also a Birthday Present boxed set "Frozen Planet" (Dad can't get enough Attenborough.) When those run out I guess it'll be back to Dad’s current gently slog through ‘improving History book "Ireland Since the Famine" (FSL Lyons).